Status-quo politics is dead, many major western parties just haven’t realized this yet. People want firmer political leadership that promises fundamental change and isn’t afraid of breaking things along the way.
It’s just fucking unfortunate that (in most countries) it’s only the far right who are ahead of the curve at realizing this.
Center to left parties need to reinvent themselves and focus less on pleasing everyone or fighting losing battles. They also need to present a much clearer vision.
Important to note here, the status quo is the status quo for a reason. Incremental evidence based change happens slowly. It cannot happen fast, and that’s good. Slow is stable. The clear vision is “the system we have but marginally better tomorrow. And then the day after tomorrow, marginally better than that.” It’s foolish to vote for anyone who promises drastic change, left, right, up, or down. It’s a trick. It’s like changing 5 variables at once in a science experiment and expecting any sort of result better than random chance. We don’t have a perfect system but rolling the dice on a wannabe fascist dictator is obviously not the way forward if you have two brain cells to run together, but an alarming amount of people seem to just not get it.
That’s only helpful if you feel like there have actually been improvements over the last few years/decades.
A lot of people feel like crime is constantly rising, morals in general are not being valued anymore and that the economy is constantly in decline. Mixed with a widespread believe that most politicians are bought anyways.
These feelings aren’t rooted in facts but they are there and they make it difficult to simultaneously believe in gradual improvement.
Just look at history though and you’ll see that most significant changes (both bad and good) happen abruptly and it’s often a bit messy.
Unfortunately it’s just the way that humans work
“Center” is almost always the establishment. The whole problem with the status quo is that they have hijacked the idea to be associated solely with them.
People generally like status quo. When life is not perfect, but doesn’t become worse. The thing is - people also hate growing and entrenching elite whose power is represented by parties who generally represent that option (and who press out anyone else trying to present a better version of it).
Ultimately people feel that power as something they want to free themselves from, and thus vote for those who promise destructive action.
Anyway, let’s not forget that the last 4 years, despite the emotion in the media, were with Biden-Harris, not with Trump. All those nice things they promised - those really can only be done after year 2024, no way to try before it, right?
And Trump, despite all the scary promises, is not going to break too many things either. The difference between these parties is not as big as it would seem.
Also he attracted RFK. RFK, other than being an antivaxxer, is almost leftist. OK, not leftist, but a normal Democrat, one can say. That may mean a bit of moderation. That’s if he gets any real influence and has not been just fooled for votes.
For the record, we progressives in the US have been trying to foment that kind of attention. Messaging seems to be artificially limited by the corporate media, which is why groups like XR have had to resort to super glue hands onto the outer frames of art.
Every time we gain some momentum, serious violence appears, perfectly on schedule, to quell our desire for change.
This is what people do not seem to understand. Fascism has the backing of global capitalism. All of the multinationals and industries who have been top dogs for the entire industrial revolution — fossil fuel corporations, weapons manufacturing and the entire military industrial complex — all of the food supply chain, major media networks, social media networks, and big tech companies, who have built a more expansive surveillance apparatus than Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia — ALL of the leaders of the highly-centralized functional-monopolies of 21st C capitalism benefit from fascism. The 1/100 who says “not like this” is irrelevant.
They’re all part of the big club (even if they are oblivious to it) and you aren’t in it.
